Prague is the kind of city that looks invented, a thousand years of Gothic spires, Baroque domes, and Art Nouveau facades stacked along a bend in the Vltava river and crowned by the largest castle complex on earth. The Czech capital was the seat of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in the 14th century, when he founded its university, laid the first stone of its great bridge, and remade a riverside town into one of Europe's imperial capitals. It earned the nickname 'the City of a Hundred Spires,' survived the 20th century with its medieval core almost untouched, and in 1989 threw off communism in the bloodless Velvet Revolution. The whole historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and for visitors it offers an astonishing density of beauty inside a compact, walkable, and still surprisingly affordable city.
Most of what you have come to see clusters on either side of the river, linked by the Charles Bridge. On the east bank lies Staré Město (the Old Town), a tangle of medieval lanes opening onto the great square with its Astronomical Clock and the twin Gothic towers of the Týn Church. Folded inside it is Josefov, the old Jewish Quarter, with the most important cluster of Jewish monuments in Europe. South and east spreads Nové Město (the New Town), Charles IV's planned 14th-century city, organised around the broad sweep of Wenceslas Square.
Across the bridge on the west bank, the Baroque palaces and red roofs of Malá Strana (the Lesser Town) climb toward Hradčany and the ramparts of Prague Castle, whose St. Vitus Cathedral dominates the skyline. Above it all rises the wooded hill of Petřín. Beyond the centre, the residential districts each have their own character: leafy, café-filled Vinohrady; gritty, pub-loving Žižkov with its rocket-like TV tower; industrial-turned-creative Holešovice and Karlín with their galleries and food halls; and the rocky fortress of Vyšehrad, tied to the mythical founding of the city, on its own bluff to the south. Group your days by district and you will spend your time wandering rather than commuting.
